Moving spirit

His first love was flamenco. He took up choreography in his teens and at 24 he founded his own company. Appointed to run Belgium's national dance theatre, he clashed with the establishment over his iconoclastic approach. Back in New York he set up the White Oak project with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Next week he is in London with his fresh take on The Nutcracker. Interview by John O'Mahony

On the corner of 23th Street and 2nd Avenue, en route to his downtown New York apartment, Mark Morris is flitting from subject to subject, sounding off about everything from the joys of performing in London to the state of American modern dance. In this hurtling, nasal and ferociously camp stream of consciousness, opinions segue into anecdotes or explode into outrage. Eventually, and for a few moments only, he settles on a single theme, that of choreographic reputations.

His company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, has just appeared at the Mostly Mozart festival in Lincoln Centre. As Morris notes, the festival has become something of a misnomer. A showcase for works from cutting-edge modern dance to experimental music, it has everything except Mozart. "It might be a good idea to rename it, maybe 'Slightly Mozart' or 'Almost Mozart'," Morris says. "Anyway, I was doing one of the press conferences before the festival, and one of the journalists asked me: 'People have called you the Mozart of modern dance. And isn't it funny that you're performing at Mostly Mozart?' So I answered: 'If you called it Mostly Morris, then nobody would come ...'"

It is difficult to agree. Morris's work numbers more than 130 original pieces, including Gloria (1981), an effervescent study of Catholic ritual; L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988), where the movements on stage are a kind of physical re-orchestration of Handel's score; and The Hard Nut (1991), a 60s reworking of The Nutcracker which opens at Sadler's Wells in London next week. "Since meeting Mark in 1987, I have danced in eight of his premieres," says Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom Morris founded the White Oak Dance Project in 1990. "I don't think anything else I can do or say would offer a more eloquent testimonial of how I feel about him and his work. He's my friend and one of the great choreographers of our time."

After gaining early experience with flamenco and Balkan dance groups in his native Seattle, Morris began choreographing his first works, such as Mourning without Clouds (1972) and Barstow (1973) while still in his teens. He founded his dance group at 24 and soon went on to produce works of startling maturity such as Castor and Pollux (1980), to the music of Harry Partch, and O Rangasayee (1984), based on traditional Indian dances. Even the appearance of the company was sensational: short, stocky men and towering women, a "girl's basketball team", as one critic commented. Morris's response was to the point: "Big bottoms, large breasts, okay with me!" After moving to New York and gaining popularity on the dance scene, the company was catapulted into the mainstream in 1984 thanks to a review in the Village Voice by legendary dance critic Arlene Croce: "This mastery of mimetic implication in the logic of forms is a mark of wisdom as rare in choreography as musical mastery," she wrote. "No other choreographer under 30 has it; the few of those over 30 who have it have been great. Like musicality, it is a gift and it appears right away."

During a painful period in Brussels, where Morris was the unlikely appointee to the post of artistic director of the Thétre de la Monnaie ballet, in Belgium's national opera house, he earned some less enthusiastic notices. Despite creating some of his most startling work during this period, including L'Allegro and Wonderland (1989), he outraged conservative Belgian critics and was pelted by headlines that read: "Mark Morris, Go Home!" and "The Pathetic Frauds of Mark Morris". The merits of these Belgian pieces have since been appreciated all over the world. "Mark is the real successor to Balanchine," says director Peter Sellars, who collaborated with him on Nixon in China (1987) and other operas. "He has created an entire body of work that is about telling stories and then magnificent profoundly realised patterns and juxtapositions. Mark goes right into the heart of the music with a sophistication that nobody else can touch."

In person, Morris is formidable. A discreet inquiry as to whether he lives alone is met with a torrent of mock indignation: "What is the question?" he bellows. "Do I have a boyfriend? Is that it? Well, the answer is a: None of your fucking business. And b: No, I wish I did. I'd love to date somebody. So, make sure you print a: None of your fucking business and b: Does anyone out there know someone who would be perfect for me?"

His flat is crammed full of religious paraphernalia, from beautiful icons to plastic tat such as "Virgin Mary" holy-water vessels. Along one wall is an impressive library of dance books, including some oversize albums of the work of iconic dance photographer Costas Cacaroukas.

His exuberance is combined with a sharp intellect: "He is so full-on," says Sellars. "Mark in conversation is the same as he is in rehearsal - relentless. You can't mess around because he will just nail something that is not right on. He has this ferocious laser-like sense of accuracy.""He defies summation," says dancer Rob Besserer. "There is no way to encapsulate him. He can be off-putting because he is huge and takes all the oxygen."

His force of personality has driven his company from its earliest days, when he convinced dancers to follow, without pay, right to the brink: "We knew there was something about Mark," says general director Nancy Umanoff. "You always knew that something was going to happen with him, it was apparent from an early age." While much has changed in the company, in particular the introduction of pay-packets and the founding of the Mark Morris Dance Centre in Brooklyn, a strong sense of family prevails. Morris's office, with its kitschy decor, mirror-ball and multicoloured Jacuzzi, is like the play-room of an overgrown child. And every aspect of the unruly artistic director's life, daily, weekly and monthly schedules, is planned by administrators: "We often joke that I hand Mark a plane ticket and that is where he goes," says Umanoff.

All this allows Morris to pour his energy into his work. He doesn't like to talk in an abstract way about his choreography: "I can talk about my work for ever, but as far as analysis and parsing and diagramming it, I don't do that." Instead, in the rehearsal room, he communicates with a torrent of physical ideas, moulding each movement many times and producing multiple versions of a single sequence: "Rather than tearing my hair out for months waiting for a step to occur to me while everybody stands around, I'll say I have no idea at all but do this and then let's change it. And then I can refine it or throw it out. I'd rather see something happen than wait for inspiration."

Morris was born on August 29 1956 in the Mount Baker district of Seattle, Washington, the son of William "Bill" Morris, a high-school teacher, and Maxine Crittenden. The Morrises were a rather strait-laced Presbyterian family. But Mark's maternal grandfather, Bill Crittenden, enjoyed dancing and music and, most unusually, dressing in costumes ranging from hobo to full drag, including precarious high heels.

Maxine was determined to instill a sense of the performing arts in her children. When he was just eight, she took Mark to a performance by José Greco's flamenco troupe: "It was thrilling and fabulous and loud," he remembers. "I immediately told my mother that that was what I wanted to do, become a flamenco dancer." He convinced his mother to enrol him at a local school, known as Verla Flowers Dance Arts where the curriculum included ballet, tap, acrobatics, Hawaiian, Tahitian, Spanish, jazz, "creative", ballroom and baton twirling.

Morris thrived in the eclectic atmosphere of the Flowers school: "At the end of our half-hour, he was still completely intent, ready to go on, and I was completely exhausted," said Flowers in an interview before her death in 2002. "When he got home, his mother told me, he would go up to his room and practise what he had learned until she made him come down to dinner. Then he would go back and practise until he had to go to bed." Soon Morris had surpassed his classmates and was contemplating a career as a flamenco dancer: "He really intended to be a professional Spanish dancer, as soon as possible," Flowers continued. "It didn't matter to him that he was nine."

Some time later, however, Morris's interest shifted. In his teens he was introduced by friends to the Koleda Folk Ensemble, a Balkan dance and music group that was a cross between an academy and a hippy commune. Penny Hutchinson, a member of the group, who would later dance in Morris's company, recalls: "A lot of the people in the ensemble were ethnic musicology students at the University of Washington. And there was tremendous interest not only in the Balkan dances but in the research, going on field trips to the Balkans, getting the authentic costumes. And also, there is that part of the culture in the Balkans and in eastern Europe that is centred around drinking and dancing and there were people who were into that also. But what kept them all together was that they loved the dancing."

The Koleda ethos also embraced the 60s spirit of personal liberation and in this relaxed atmosphere Morris flourished. "He was able to let his hair down and be completely wild," said fellow member Chad Henry. "Because he had this safety net of people around him who were all doing the same thing." In between lengthy sessions of Romanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian dancing, Morris embarked on his first homosexual relationships: "I fell in love with the group," he says, "then I fell in love with several individuals in sequence and then they fell in love with each other."

By his mid-teens, Mark had begun creating his first works, using a cast of friends from Verla Flowers and Koleda. These dances included Barstow, based on American composer Partch's song-cycle about eight wandering hobo souls: "It was a little story dance and each of us took one of the characters," remembers Hutchinson. "You could see the beginning of Mark's style where he started doing word painting illustrating the text, which was fun." Set to unlikely and experimental scores, ranging from popular music of the 1920s to Partch and Conlon Nancarrow, these early pieces also illustrated the choreographer's enduring preoccupation with the musicality of dance. For Mourning without Clouds, created when he was 15, Morris composed a score.

This wasn't easy to bear for all the members of his family, in particular his father, who tacitly disapproved of his son's interests and behaviour: "Bill [Morris] was a big sort of manly man," remembers Hutchinson, "and Mark was foppish, the young one of the family, really mercurial and interested in everything. Bill could probably see his son was gay or heading that way."

Before these tensions could be resolved, Bill Morris died suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 59. "It happened on the day that I got my first job teaching Spanish dance," Morris recalls. "I came home from this interview saying: 'Hurray everybody, wait till you hear this!' But nobody was there."

At the time, Mark had been planning a grand dance tour of Europe, trekking first through the Balkans to experience local movement first-hand and ending up in Spain to fulfil his dream of becoming a flamenco dancer. To his mother's credit, she let him go ahead with the adventure: "I stayed with a Macedonian choreographer and we went to weddings and parties and festivals," he recalls. "I was in Macedonia and Greece for about a month and it was heaven." Spain, though, was a disappointment, and the tawdry tourist-driven state of flamenco and the homophobia of Franco's fascist regime soon drove Morris back to Seattle, where he spent a year-and-a-half teaching Spanish dance at the Flowers academy.

But his ultimate destination was New York, where he arrived in 1976, immediately picking up work with companies such as the Eliot Feld Ballet and staying for a year before moving on to the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company (1977-78) and the Hannah Kahn company (1979-82) as well as short stints with Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham. Other friends from Seattle gravitated towards the expansive loft apartment in the down-at-heel area of Hoboken, New Jersey, where he lived with then boyfriend, dancer Erin Matthiessen. "Mark had a giant space, a living area and a huge loft area," remembers dancer Tina Fehlandt. "It was a great place for parties because there was so much room and we could dance and rehearse there also." Fehlandt's boyfriend, Barry Alterman, recalls the nightly pilgrimage to Morris's flat: "Those years were poverty stricken for everyone. We didn't have enough money to do anything so we just hung out at Mark's place every night. And he would make some interesting concoction out of rice and beans and we would play scrabble or watch Dynasty on TV."

It was from this extended family of friends and acquaintances, all of whom volunteered their services unpaid, that the Mark Morris Dance Group quickly grew. A revival of Barstow and Castor and Pollux (again to music by Partch) at the Merce Cunningham Studio in 1980 resulted in an invitation to perform at the fashionable downtown Dance Theatre Workshop, where Morris premiered a first incarnation of Gloria , to Vivaldi's score, following it up with New Love Song Waltzes in 1982 and 10 works at the same venue the following year. This led to the company's first major critical breakthrough - Croce's column in the Village Voice entitled "Mark Morris Comes to Town", which credited him with "the raw gift of choreography".

The article stimulated interest in the company's next show, due to take place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), which had launched the careers of Lucinda Childs, Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson. Morris began with a radically updated version of Gloria , followed by O Rangasayee , a repetitive, highly eccentric 23-minute solo danced ecstatically by Morris himself. The programme culminated with Championship Wrestling (1984), an uproarious comment on the pomp and posturing of television wrestlers.

The sudden maturity of the work surprised even those closest to Morris: "I always thought that Mark had great potential during those early years," says Alterman. "But that wasn't anything special really. I knew lots of artists who I felt had lots of potential. And then I saw something that Mark did in the winter of 1984 that really changed my mind. That programme was spectacular." The critics agreed: "What might have been the merest kitsch, or even camp, was in fact a serious act of aesthetic assimilation," wrote Wall Street Journal critic Dale Harris of O Rangasayee. Tobi Tobias of New York magazine proclaimed: "Pessimists who announced that the line of great modern dance choreographers had ended with Paul Taylor have been shown up ... by the work of Mark Morris."

Morris was suddenly the hottest young choreographer in America. In 1985 the group played three sold-out weeks at Dance Theatre Workshop, premiering Frisson, to music by Stravinsky, and One Charming Night (both 1985): "A kind of diseased sexuality hangs over the suite of dances," commented the New York Times of the latter, "as the performers, dressed in street and bedroom attire and underwear, flung themselves down passionately on rubber dolls scattered across the floor." The following year they were back at BAM, this time playing on the big Opera House stage with Pièces en Concert and Stabat Mater, a work about religious conviction set to music by Pergolesi. Morris was commissioned by Sellars to create the pivotal Socialist Realist ballet for the world premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China in 1987.

At this time, the company was still functioning on an ad-hoc basis, with dancers sleeping on floors and receiving little money. This put a strain on its members, and on Morris, who was customarily cheery but now became cantankerous. In 1986, two weeks after the BAM season, he broke his leg during rehearsal for a show in Ottawa, with enormous repercussions: "He was out for three to four months," remembers Alterman. "And I think it's true to say that he didn't have quite the same facility as a dancer after the break that he had before."

It was Alterman, who came on board as manager in 1984, who began to reshape the company from a band of friends into an organisation that could meet these new demands. But an offer in 1988 from the most unlikely quarter hurried this transformation at a pace and in a manner that no one could have predicted. It began with the sudden resignation of French choreographer Maurice Béjart as director of dance at the Thétre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, a position he had held for 20 years. The theatre's overall director, Gérard Mortier, was in a quandary and turned for advice to his friend Sellars: "Béjart had just left that morning," Sellars recalls, "and Gérard needed to replace Béjart with someone who would have huge impact, would have Béjart's sense of brilliant theatricality and be a public figure that you either loved or hated but you couldn't ignore. And so I asked Gérard to fly down to Stuttgart where Mark was performing." After seeing just a single performance of the programme, which included Gloria, Mortier went backstage and made the offer.

The proposal, which included running Béjart's former dance centre, including four rehearsal studios, an exercise room, a canteen and offices, not to mention the facilities and orchestra of the Monnaie itself, proved irresistible. "It was a crazy, crazy idea but we did it and why not?" Morris says. But the adventure quickly began to go awry. At the initial press conference, Morris turned up wearing a cowboy shirt and a bootlace tie and flung back responses with irreverent humour. "What is your philosophy of dance?" asked one Belgian critic. "My philosophy of dance?" Morris answered, "I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy."

After some similarly fraught exchanges, Morris made the miscalculation of denigrating Béjart: "No, I don't like Béjart," he claimed, "I liked him 15 years ago, but not any more ... I have the sense that he's tired." As far as Belgians were concerned, Béjart, with his energetic and brooding ballets, was modern dance, and to state otherwise was blasphemy. But they were willing to give Morris a chance, and his first piece, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato received grudgingly positive reviews, though others grumbled that Morris's work demonstrated a "dumbfounding simplicity, more American than European". But by the time of the premiere of Dido and Aeneas (1989), in which Morris played Dido in drag, any goodwill had melted away, and the piece was damned as "tasteless" and "debased". The most ferocious reaction was reserved for Mythologies (1986), a hugely ambitious triptych based on the book by Roland Barthes. "As soon as we hit the stage, the boos started," Alterman recalls, "Real, vociferous heavy booing." The next day, Morris and the dancers were greeted by the main Belgian newspaper Le Soir proclaiming in English: "Mark Morris, Go Home!". The review continued: "Provocation or suicidal anti-performance? Mark Morris ... gave a preposterous demonstration of his creative poverty. The man who succeeded King Béjart laid himself bare."

The ferocity of the attack came as a shock to Morris: "I'd done it in the extremely conservative surroundings of Boston and it was fine," he says. "It's not even nudity, it's seductive and it ends naked with fluorescent lights. And we showed it in Brussels where it was a giant trauma. People just couldn't believe it. I suppose they thought: 'how dare I, an American, deal with the great text of Roland Barthes?'" The company, already unsettled by the changes and hating Brussels, was even more devastated: "At that point, many of us wanted to go home," says Fehlandt. "Quite a few of the older members of the company left after that first year. It was difficult, especially with Mythologies, where you expose yourself literally and metaphorically to the public in that way."

There were further complications when Mortier failed to renew contracts for company administrators Alterman and Umanoff, though the Belgian sojourn did end on a positive note as The Hard Nut was deemed by Le Soir "a jewel of invention, humour, fantasy and poetry".

But by 1991, Morris was on his way back to New York, where he had set up the White Oak Dance Project with Barysh-nikov (while also camping out in Baryshnikov's New York loft apartment). The idea behind the company was one of total artistic freedom and a rigorously modern approach to modern dance, while also giving opportunities to more seasoned dancers: "We don't have any particular philosophy," says Baryshnikov of the company, which has enjoyed almost 15 years of success with works by Morris as well as iconoclasts like Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. "We're all mature dancers and we are all more involved with the everyday particulars of the company than most dancers might expect to be. We discuss around a table how long we want to work, what we want to do, where we want to go and how many performances we want to dance. Everybody has a decision."

Throughout this period Morris continued working on a typically prolific scale, producing Sandpaper Ballet to the music of Leroy Anderson in 1999, Peccadillos to Erik Satie in 2000 and Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson with libretto by Gertrude Stein, which premiered in London the same year, to some sniffy reviews: "For the first time, I found the dancing chorus intrusive; an unaware innocence has been lost in this revival," complained the Observer's dance critic, Jann Parry. "Even Morris seems too knowing." The choreographer was back on form with V (2001), created to a Schumann quintet before the September 11 attacks but afterwards dedicated to the resilience of New York, and this year's ambitious Sylvia, set to Delibes's classic 19th-century score: "The first Sylvia ever made for an American company," said the Financial Times, "is nothing less than a career landmark, an enchanting blend of movement vocabularies and a wondrous demonstration of the power of tonal nuance ... The entire company danced as one would expect in the presence of a modern master."

Still only 48, Morris looks as though he will be a major force in modern dance for decades to come: "But I am doing exactly what I want, which I love," he concludes. "It's way bigger than I thought it would be. I have much more presence and influence than I ever imagined I would. But, don't worry. I'm not planning on world domination or anything like that. There is too much competition there. There are too many Americans who already have that goal."